50 years of Watergate’s lingering consequences

On June 17, 1972, police arrested five burglars inside the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate Complex. Despite tenacious reporting by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the story gained little traction initially, and President Richard Nixon won reelection in a landslide.

The Watergate cover-up began to unravel in March 1973 after defendant James Mccord’s letter to Judge John Sirica revealed there “was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent.” Other turning points in the investigation occurred when Alexander Butterfield disclosed the existence of the White House taping system, and when the president ordered the firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Responding to public outrage over the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Nixon agreed to Leon Jaworski’s appointment to replace Cox.

During Watergate, our system of checks and balances worked well. The investigations by the Senate Watergate and House

Judiciary committees were models of bipartisanship and judiciousness. Most Republican voters and elected officials initially supported Nixon, but abandoned him when the extent of his misconduct became apparent.

Claiming executive privilege, Nixon refused to release the most damaging tapes until the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against him. The tapes proved that he directed the cover-up, including the payment of hush money to the burglars. The break-in and cover-up were the tip of the iceberg of a brazen pattern of corruption, lawbreaking, and abuse of power by Nixon and his subordinates. These included burglarizing Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, soliciting illegal campaign contributions, and secretly bombing Cambodia.

Forty-eight people were found guilty of crimes connected to the Watergate scandal, including Attorney General John Mitchell and White House aides H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Dean. Although the Watergate grand jury named Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator in the cover-up, President Gerald Ford pardoned him for any crimes he committed while president.

Nixon’s misdeeds had lasting harmful effects on our democracy. Public trust in government has not recovered, and contemporary Republicans have expanded upon his divisive brand of grievance politics. Ford’s pardon of Nixon also has not stood the test of time. As historian Rick Perlstein writes, the pardon “caused a cascade of elite wrongdoing that was specifically enabled by this single act of determining that the Presidency was too big to fail.”